Lives

978-0-9755716-2-0
0-9755716-2-1

$10 (paper)
93 pages

Lives is a rich and lyrical collection of poems - both a passionate and occasionally ironical account of life in a modern world of infinite possibility. Here is the full spectrum of the varied colors of human experience from the pleasantly erotic to the disturbingly violent. The poet breaks from contemporary forms of expression to confront reality and the beyond, and to communicate powerful truths about eternal situations.

Filled with vivid (and visceral) imagery of work, love, dreams, and death, these poems celebrate the phenomenal aspects of life while acknowledging the futility of our continual search for meaning. The need for ritual, reason, and intoxication all serve as (black) comic relief from the all-too-common experience of tragedy.

Lucas Hunt was born in rural Iowa and now makes his home on Long Island. A graduate of Southampton College, he has worked as a journalist and written several volumes of poetry and plays. He has been presented with a John Steinbeck Award for poetry. For more information see: Lucas Hunt.

Reviews
With his new collection of poetry, "Lives," Lucas Hunt reveals himself as a young man with a philosophical bent. . . . He is ambitious as well as philosophical. But he is never grim. There is a kind of Keatsian ardor underlying his Eliotesque grapplings with the existential void . . . Lucas Hunt's "Lives" marks the debut of a very fine poet.
-- Southampton Press, NY

Written by Lucas Hunt, Lives is a collection of brief, free-verse poems addressed directly to human lives and dreams . . . A spot-on accurate cross-section of insights into the uniqueness of not only individual life, but also the seemingly commonplace phenomena that affect it.
-- The Midwest Book Review

This debut collection of poetry by a native Iowan, Lucas Hunt, is one of the most beautiful and thought-provoking books to appear in recent years. Subtle humor - ostensibly didactic in places, is woven into the fabric of an emotional landscape where the reader might see herself: musing, loving, striving, and occasionally floundering in a strange and spiritual world; an America for all. . . This collection is funny and clever, but above all, hauntingly beautiful; Hunt's subjects use language to confess their vulnerability and hope.
-- Simon Van Booy, author of The Secret Lives of People in Love